The timing of first union merits investigation not only because of the close temporal link between marriage and the onset of childbearing, but also because the age when men and women marry has implications for the organization of family life and for gender relations within society. This paper begins by reviewing the contributions of various social science disciplines to an understanding of the ...

BACKGROUND Short birth intervals are independently associated with increased risk of adverse maternal, perinatal, infant and child outcomes. Anemia in children, which is highly prevalent in Africa, is associated with an increased risk of morbidity and mortality. Birth spacing is advocated as a tool to reduce anemia in preschool African children, but the role of gender differences and contextual...

Using a set of statistical methods and HIV mathematical models applied on nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey data, we characterized HIV serodiscordancy patterns and HIV transmission dynamics in stable couples (SCs) in four countries: Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and India. The majority of SCs affected by HIV were serodiscordant, and about a third of HIV-infected...

Demographic transition is a set of changes in reproductive behavior that are experienced as a society is transformed from a traditional pre-industrial state to a highly developed, modernized structure. The transformation is the substitution of slow growth achieved with low fertility and mortality for slow growth maintained with relatively high fertility and mortality rates. Contrary to early ...

This is a descriptive study of the health and hygiene behaviors of grandparents who are the primary caregivers of their grandchildren in four West African countries, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. The article utilizes data from each country’s most recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). The study identified 20,841 households where grandparents were primary caregivers. As expecte...

OBJECTIVE To compare HIV seroprevalence estimates obtained from antenatal care (ANC) sentinel surveillance surveys in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda with those from population-based demographic and health surveys (DHS) and AIDS indicator surveys (AIS). METHODS Geographical information system methods were used to map ANC surveillance sites and DHS/AIS survey clusters within a 15-...

This paper juxtaposes changes over the last forty years in income growth and distribution with the mortality changes recorded at the aggregate level in about 170 countries and at the individual level in 26 countries with at least two demographic and health surveys covering the last twenty years. Over the 1980s and 1990s, the infant mortality rate, under-5 mortality rate, and life expectancy at ...

This paper, using data from the 2000 Iran Demographic and Health Survey and a range of time-varying district-level contextual information derived from the 1986 and 1996 censuses of Iran, applies a discrete time hazard model to study ethnic differences in women’s transition to first marriage. The model specification accounts for both spatial and temporal changes in the socio-economic context of ...

grams. Few of these systems attempt to monitor the expansion of services and supplies among commercial-sector providers.1 Although national contraceptive prevalence surveys, such as the Demographic and Health Surveys, provide information on the total service environment (including clinical and nonclinical services and supplies in the public and private sectors), these surveys are conducted infr...

6 Prediction of future child’s sex is a question of keen public interest. Probability of having a child of 7 either sex is close to 50%, although multiple factors may slightly change this value. Some 8 demographic studies suggested that sex determination can be influenced by previous pregnancies, 9 although this hypothesis was not commonly accepted. This paper explores correlations between 10 s...